The job that AI seems keenest to take is the one on the other end of the phone. Allianz, the German insurance giant, is preparing to cut as many as 1,800 roles in its travel arm as automated systems take over work that used to need a person, according to Reuters.
The figures are oddly precise for a plan nobody has formally announced. Somewhere between 1,500 and 1,800 jobs will go at Allianz Partners over the next 12 to 18 months, most of them in call centres.
That division was always going to feel this first. Of its roughly 22,600 staff, about 14,000 spend their days fielding customer questions and settling claims by phone, which happens to be exactly what conversational AI was built to do.
The work suits the machine almost too well. A traveller stranded by a cancelled flight or chasing a lost bag is asking a fairly predictable set of questions, and a system that can read, sort and answer them never needs a lunch break.
The cuts do not stop at one border. Reports put them at up to 8% of the division, falling on workers in Germany, France and elsewhere across Europe. Allianz itself has said almost nothing. It declined to comment specifically on the reductions, the familiar corporate quiet that settles in when a workforce plan leaks before its official reveal.
